I think the second problem is solveable. I’ve extracted suitable data for a project classifying tweets as hate speech from the twitter apis (you can at the very least get all tweets containing certain search terms). As to integration with a site, I think it should be possible to create a browser addon that deletes content (or perhaps replaces it with a trollface image?) identified as trolling from a page as you load it (I don’t know of an example of something that does this offhand, but I know there are addons that, ie., remove the entire newsfeed from a facebook page). There might be some problems relative to facebook or twitter implementing it themselves, but it would be possible to at least get a start on it.
What definition of “hate speech” did you use? For example, does mentioning that members of group X have lower IQ’s and are more likely to commit violent crimes count as “hate speech”? Does it matter if all the relevant statistics indicate this is indeed the case? Does it matter if it’s true?
Sorry, wasn’t meaning to get into the question of how accurate you could be—I just wanted to clarify technical feasibility of data collection and website modification. The project in question was just for a university course, and not intended for anything like the system described in this post. I just used a bag of words model, with tweets only pulled which contained words which are typically used as slurs towards a particular group. Obviously, accuracy wasn’t very good individual tweet classification, the model only worked well when specific terms were used, and it missed a lot of nuance (ie. quoted song lyrics). It wasn’t what you would need for troll classification.
For anything to work for this application, you’d probably need to limit the use of automatic classification to suggesting that a tweet might be trolling, subject to later manual reclassification, or to identifying users that are frequent and blatant trolls, and it’s an open question as to whether you could actually make something useful from the available data.
While the term is clearly overused, I think it is not entirely useless. One useful method is to focus not on the victim but on the speaker. Does the speaker sound like someone bringing others down just to feel better about himself? For example, Murray’s The Bell Curve was attacked a lot for its alleged racism, but it was not actually hate speech, the tone was that of a deeply concerned and frightened and reluctant admittance of human differences. However just go on reddit and you find many examples of people engaging in cheap potshots of racism or sexism largely as a way to comparatively feel better about themselves. If a racial or gender oriented comment sounds like something said by a gamma male in a proverbial parental basement to feel comparatively better, it is hate speech. /r/fatpeoplehate is a good example, if you count the various kinds of insults “butter slugs” “butter golems” etc.
If it sounds strange, then let me remind you that hate is an emotion. It is something felt by people. So hate depends on not whether it had or had not hurt the victim, but whether the perpetrator felt it or not. So offensive speech (victim angle) can still not be hate speech (perp angle) and vice versa.
but it was not actually hate speech, the tone was that of a deeply concerned and frightened and reluctant admittance of human differences. However just go on reddit and you find many examples of people engaging in cheap potshots of racism or sexism largely as a way to comparatively feel better about themselves.
Note, how you’ve just conflated “hate speech” with “racism” and “sexism”. Yes, hate is an emotion (at least that’s the original meaning of them word) and like all emotions there are rational and irrational reasons to feel it. However, as the term is commonly used today “hate speech” has almost nothing to do with “hate”. You mention that it’s inappropriately applied to situations where there is no actual hate. On the other hand you’re still implicitly restricting it to situations where the target is an official victim group.
If a racial or gender oriented comment sounds like something said by a gamma male in a proverbial parental basement to feel comparatively better, it is hate speech.
This is incomplete because it ignores the possibility of countersignalling—”you’re so inferior that I don’t even need to use swear words at you to demonstrate hate”.
Gammas almost by definition aren’t going to be counter-signaling anything.
He did not say it was said by gammas. He said that it resembles something said by gammas (but was said by other people). These other people could countersignal.
You seem to be making the mistake under discussion by conflating being superior to someone with “hating” him.
No, I’m not. I didn’t say that feeling superior is hate; I said that feeling superior affects how one expresses hate. Someone who feels superior might express hate using nice words, if his status is such that it is clear that he is not using the nice words to actually be nice.
That’s very interesting! I would obviously love it if such a browser addon could be constructed. And the trollface image is a great idea. :)
By the way, the fact that your very insightful comment is downvoted is really a shame. Why do people downvote interesting and informative comments like this? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Most of the top comments are “this is a terrible idea and here are the reasons we should never do it”, and his comment is “we can do it sooner than you think, here’s how”. To people concerned about censorship and creation of echo-chambers, the trollface image is adding insult to injury for those harmed by the filter as well as being an easy-to-imagine detail so people are less detached and more emotional in responding to it.
Also personally, while I grudgingly accept that people currently use “troll” to simply mean “mean person on the internet” without regard to the more specific meaning that “troll” used to have, I’m pretty sure the trollface is specific to trolling in the latter sense, while it’s only the former that could plausibly be detected by a filter, and the incorrect usage of the meme aggravates me no end.
Most of the top comments are “this is a terrible idea and here are the reasons we should never do it”, and his comment is “we can do it sooner than you think, here’s how”.
I get that. But in my book you don’t downvote a comment simply because you don’t agree with it. You downvote a comment because it is poorly argued, makes no sense, or something like that. Clearly, that doesn’t apply to this comment.
Well, the disagreement is on the level of the latter taking completely for granted the point that the former is disagreeing with (i.e. that the ‘troll filter’ is desirable), which could be “poorly argued” from some perspectives, or otherwise seems to fall under the “or something like that” umbrella.
Not a great way, but a small step towards, yes :-)
But the LW-in-reality is some distance away from the LW-as-it-should-be. In practice I see downvotes on the basis of disagreement all the time. This is what is (descriptive) regardless of what people would like to be (normative).
Discussing the details of how to do bad things, and doing so for its own sake rather than as a step towards showing something else, is in the real world Bayseian evidence that you support those bad things. Announcing “I personally have started implementing a step needed for one of those bad things” is even worse.
I think the second problem is solveable. I’ve extracted suitable data for a project classifying tweets as hate speech from the twitter apis (you can at the very least get all tweets containing certain search terms). As to integration with a site, I think it should be possible to create a browser addon that deletes content (or perhaps replaces it with a trollface image?) identified as trolling from a page as you load it (I don’t know of an example of something that does this offhand, but I know there are addons that, ie., remove the entire newsfeed from a facebook page). There might be some problems relative to facebook or twitter implementing it themselves, but it would be possible to at least get a start on it.
What definition of “hate speech” did you use? For example, does mentioning that members of group X have lower IQ’s and are more likely to commit violent crimes count as “hate speech”? Does it matter if all the relevant statistics indicate this is indeed the case? Does it matter if it’s true?
Sorry, wasn’t meaning to get into the question of how accurate you could be—I just wanted to clarify technical feasibility of data collection and website modification. The project in question was just for a university course, and not intended for anything like the system described in this post. I just used a bag of words model, with tweets only pulled which contained words which are typically used as slurs towards a particular group. Obviously, accuracy wasn’t very good individual tweet classification, the model only worked well when specific terms were used, and it missed a lot of nuance (ie. quoted song lyrics). It wasn’t what you would need for troll classification.
For anything to work for this application, you’d probably need to limit the use of automatic classification to suggesting that a tweet might be trolling, subject to later manual reclassification, or to identifying users that are frequent and blatant trolls, and it’s an open question as to whether you could actually make something useful from the available data.
My point is that I don’t think “hate speech” is a well defined concept. In practice it winds up cashing out as “speech I disagree with”.
While the term is clearly overused, I think it is not entirely useless. One useful method is to focus not on the victim but on the speaker. Does the speaker sound like someone bringing others down just to feel better about himself? For example, Murray’s The Bell Curve was attacked a lot for its alleged racism, but it was not actually hate speech, the tone was that of a deeply concerned and frightened and reluctant admittance of human differences. However just go on reddit and you find many examples of people engaging in cheap potshots of racism or sexism largely as a way to comparatively feel better about themselves. If a racial or gender oriented comment sounds like something said by a gamma male in a proverbial parental basement to feel comparatively better, it is hate speech. /r/fatpeoplehate is a good example, if you count the various kinds of insults “butter slugs” “butter golems” etc.
If it sounds strange, then let me remind you that hate is an emotion. It is something felt by people. So hate depends on not whether it had or had not hurt the victim, but whether the perpetrator felt it or not. So offensive speech (victim angle) can still not be hate speech (perp angle) and vice versa.
Note, how you’ve just conflated “hate speech” with “racism” and “sexism”. Yes, hate is an emotion (at least that’s the original meaning of them word) and like all emotions there are rational and irrational reasons to feel it. However, as the term is commonly used today “hate speech” has almost nothing to do with “hate”. You mention that it’s inappropriately applied to situations where there is no actual hate. On the other hand you’re still implicitly restricting it to situations where the target is an official victim group.
This is incomplete because it ignores the possibility of countersignalling—”you’re so inferior that I don’t even need to use swear words at you to demonstrate hate”.
Gammas almost by definition aren’t going to be counter-signaling anything.
You seem to be making the mistake under discussion by conflating being superior to someone with “hating” him.
He did not say it was said by gammas. He said that it resembles something said by gammas (but was said by other people). These other people could countersignal.
No, I’m not. I didn’t say that feeling superior is hate; I said that feeling superior affects how one expresses hate. Someone who feels superior might express hate using nice words, if his status is such that it is clear that he is not using the nice words to actually be nice.
That’s very interesting! I would obviously love it if such a browser addon could be constructed. And the trollface image is a great idea. :)
By the way, the fact that your very insightful comment is downvoted is really a shame. Why do people downvote interesting and informative comments like this? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Most of the top comments are “this is a terrible idea and here are the reasons we should never do it”, and his comment is “we can do it sooner than you think, here’s how”. To people concerned about censorship and creation of echo-chambers, the trollface image is adding insult to injury for those harmed by the filter as well as being an easy-to-imagine detail so people are less detached and more emotional in responding to it.
Also personally, while I grudgingly accept that people currently use “troll” to simply mean “mean person on the internet” without regard to the more specific meaning that “troll” used to have, I’m pretty sure the trollface is specific to trolling in the latter sense, while it’s only the former that could plausibly be detected by a filter, and the incorrect usage of the meme aggravates me no end.
I get that. But in my book you don’t downvote a comment simply because you don’t agree with it. You downvote a comment because it is poorly argued, makes no sense, or something like that. Clearly, that doesn’t apply to this comment.
Well, the disagreement is on the level of the latter taking completely for granted the point that the former is disagreeing with (i.e. that the ‘troll filter’ is desirable), which could be “poorly argued” from some perspectives, or otherwise seems to fall under the “or something like that” umbrella.
Does it surprise you that many people here have books that are different from yours?
This seems like a great way to build echo chambers. “Oh, he dares to hold a different view than mine? Downvote!”
Not a great way, but a small step towards, yes :-)
But the LW-in-reality is some distance away from the LW-as-it-should-be. In practice I see downvotes on the basis of disagreement all the time. This is what is (descriptive) regardless of what people would like to be (normative).
Discussing the details of how to do bad things, and doing so for its own sake rather than as a step towards showing something else, is in the real world Bayseian evidence that you support those bad things. Announcing “I personally have started implementing a step needed for one of those bad things” is even worse.